


that dead men rise up never

by tonepoem



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Jedao Lives, Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, sorry there aren't any kdrama jokes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-03
Updated: 2017-11-03
Packaged: 2018-12-24 12:32:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12012804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tonepoem/pseuds/tonepoem
Summary: Cheris and Jedao survive the ending of Ninefox Gambit, but will they survive each other during their escape from the hexarchate?No spoilers for Raven Stratagem.





	that dead men rise up never

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weakinteraction](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/gifts).



_one_

When Cheris had signed up for the mission at the Fortress of Scattered Needles, she had foreseen any number of possible ends. _Burning up_ was a fate that all Kel took for granted, after all. They weren't called "suicide hawks" for nothing. She'd had nightmares about assassins, or sabotage of the command moth, or even bombardment from enemy reinforcements.

She hadn't expected to be taken out by her own side.

Cheris ached all over, and it felt as though she'd just been slammed to the deck by more g-forces than even Kel infantry should have to endure. But her command moth had just been attacked by _other Kel_ , by the very reinforcements she'd naively been looking forward to, and she didn't have any reason to believe that the situation had become any _safer_. She scrambled upright.

The entire command center had been transformed: pillars of eerie fluted glass stood--and her heart clenched in sudden dismay--where her officers had been. "Commander Hazan?" she croaked.

No answer.

"Cheris," Jedao whispered. "It's no use. They're gone. Everyone in the swarm--you're the only survivor. They were willing to incapacitate _two cindermoths_ for a chance at assassinating me."

She almost couldn't see the ninefox shadow at first. It had gone dim, almost as though someone had shone a light on it. Even the yellow eyes were faint. But it wasn't _gone_.

She wasn't sure what she felt first: relief, anger, dismay. Perhaps all of them. "I have to see to my crew--"

"Cheris," Jedao said, no more loudly, but with a note of urgency. "Don't waste time. If they have another one of those bombs, I won't survive, and you won't either. It almost took me out as it is. We have to get out of here."

She cast a single glance at the array of glistening pillars, shuddering at the way some of them seemed caught in the act of melting into humanoid figures, and nodded. Jedao might have played her false in the past, but she didn't think he was lying. Not now. Later--well, she would deal with that once she survived the immediate situation.

"I don't think we're going to escape with a shuttle," Cheris said grimly.

"Hell with the shuttle," Jedao said, "take the whole damn cindermoth. I'm not reading any damage to the moth itself. It's just that you have no crew."

Panic threatened to choke her. How much time did they have left? Was there another squad of suicide moths on the way? "Six minutes is a very short time to learn how to pilot a moth." For the first time in her career she regretted her infantry background, even if she'd never had any ambition to become a moth commander.

She heard Jedao's sardonic laughter. "I was a moth commander once, and I've been watching your commanders as well." Later she would remember how he declined to use Nerevor's name, or Hazan's. "Let me handle it."

Cheris didn't like the thought of surrendering her body to his guidance yet again. Realistically, however, she had no choice. "Do it," she said.

The bleed-through was stronger than ever before. A gasp choked in her throat as her body _moved_ , as she was walked to Commander Hazan's station with strides just long enough to be uncomfortable for her shorter legs. No sooner had she registered her discomfort than the strides shortened.

"Sorry," Jedao said, terse. "It's--it's been a long time."

Cheris watched with a mix of bemusement and increasing alarm as her hands flickered over the controls, as lights lit up on the control panels, and the mothdrive hummed on. In particular--"You could do this _all along_?" she demanded, appalled.

Her hands kept moving. Plotted a course to coordinates that meant nothing to her--wait. Something tickled at the edge of her memory from the astrographical survey she'd taken back in Kel Academy years ago.

"I could," Jedao said, "but I didn't for reasons that should be obvious if you think about it. Quiet, please. I need to concentrate to make sure I don't get this wrong."

Cheris's mouth snapped shut. At least she was sure that was her and not him. As much as the situation disturbed her, he was right. This was not the time to distract him.

Her hands strapped her in with harsh efficiency. All the while Cheris was aware of the glass pillar behind her, the crystalline reflections that it threw across the deck. She thought bleakly that she hadn't always liked Commander Hazan, but this wasn't the death she would have wished for him, either.

The _Unspoken Law_ surged forward. While Jedao handled navigation, Cheris watched. Was this what it had been like for him, all through those four centuries without a body? Watching, always watching, and unable to act without _permission_?

Except he had just proven that it wasn't a matter of permission, maybe never had been.

When Jedao leaned her body back and relaxed, Cheris spoke. "I didn't realize the hexarchs had been so careless with you."

Jedao's laugh lacked humor. "I wouldn't call it that. I had a highly placed ally. An unreliable one. It seems I offended him. But we can deal with that another day. Right now our priority is getting the hell out of the hexarchate."

That alarmed her. "So we _are_ headed toward the border." She'd been right about those coordinates after all.

"Do you want to stay?"

"You're going to trigger a war!" Cheris couldn't imagine that Kel Command would simply let Jedao escape. They'd launch an invasion if that was what it took. Especially considering they'd just--and she allowed herself to consider the magnitude of the act-- _stolen a cindermoth_.

"Beats dying," Jedao said, very dryly. "I should know." A beat. "I realize this does mean your supply of terrible dueling dramas is limited to what we already have in the cindermoth's memory."

It was just as well that throwing something at him would have absolutely no effect. Tentatively, Cheris closed her eyes, then put her head in her hands. No resistance. Which was good, because if he hijacked her body at random intervals _without her permission_ this was not going to end well, and she imagined he'd figured that out already.

Calm down. Assess the situation. "Did that bomb hit our food supplies? How much trouble are we in when it comes to life support?"

Jedao's voice was only slightly tense. "I've...seen tests of this particular weapon. It kills people but the stock of rations should be fine. Considering there's only one of you left to feed, that's...not the issue."

Cheris looked at the star maps, at the course that they were taking. She only hoped that they could outrun anything else the hexarchate could send after them. It was the barest, coldest comfort that she didn't think Kel Command would want to risk the hexarchate's defenses by pulling all its cindermoths off duty to pursue them. And besides, space was vast, and they had a head start.

"You must have a plan." Cheris didn't bother keeping the sarcasm from her voice. Considering how easily he could read her, there wasn't any point.

The yellow eyes gleamed. "Well, yes and no. I can get us out of here. But," and a sudden hunger made his voice raw, "I wanted something better for the hexarchate's people. Something more than formation instinct and burning up and torture. I waited for _years_ for the opportunity--"

Cheris scoffed. "And _that's_ why you thought it was all right to bait Kel Command into bombing us and kill a million people? I'm sorry, Jedao, but even infantry Kel aren't that stupid. Try again."

He sounded aggrieved. "I can't prove anything at this end of time, no."

"You would have had to start four hundred years ago," Cheris said, "by not massacring all those people."

He fell silent.

_two_

"It won't hurt," Kujen had said. Kujen wasn't even trying to lie convincingly.

Jedao stared at him through the fractured vision of nine inhuman eyes. It had taken surprisingly little time to acclimate to--was it even compound vision? He wished he'd studied spiders more, back when he'd still been alive. He was pretty sure that even spiders couldn't see in all directions at once, but he was no student of creepy-crawlies.

Kujen had locked him in a dark vaster even than space. Space was almost empty, which meant it had a little bit of light in it, if you traveled smart enough. Space had _stars_.

The black cradle had no stars. No sound. Nothing but his own thoughts scratching, scratching, forever scratching at the lid looking for a way out. Except, of course, there was no way out that didn't go through Kujen.

He'd thought very hard, years ago, about getting a damn _fix_ for the dyscalculia. Assuming he could find a psych surgeon he trusted with the job. Besides, he knew just as well as anyone else that that only shifted the problem. Just because he stopped mixing up basic arithmetic wouldn't mean that he'd magically become a genius mathematician. And he'd have to be a genius to fix the whole fucking calendar.

Sure, given enough time, maybe he could have learned the fundamentals of calendrical math. But he was also certain that he couldn't learn them well enough to be a genius at them _and_ also be a general. There were only so many hours in the day.

So he'd taken the hard sharp plunge into darkness, because even a distant hope was better than none.

He wondered how many battles it would take before he foreswore himself and became exactly what Kel Command wanted him to be.

_three_

Cheris started scratching out days on one of the bulkheads. While she didn't enjoy defacing her cindermoth (so odd to think of it that way, as _hers_ ), she needed to keep track of time, and she didn't have that handy Nirai ability to just _know_. Strictly speaking, she didn't need to also keep track of how many days remained until they reached their destination, but she did the subtraction as a courtesy to Jedao.

"So tell me again about this plan of yours," Cheris had said, skeptical, but wanting someone to talk to who wasn't a creepy morbid glass pillar. She slept in short snatches like a cat. In between the naps, she inventoried everything from ration bars to stasis jars of pickles to missiles; obsessively checked the Navigation terminal to make sure they weren't drifting off course; looked for any sign that the heptarchate was mobilizing to catch them. After the first unnerving hours of silence, she wanted assurance that Jedao was, if not all right, at least not dead. Deader.

The eyes glimmered, then dimmed. "I'd really hoped to have a swarm under my command," he said. "That's not going to be an option. The Kel will have orders to shoot us on sight."

"What, you can't tactics your way into another brilliant victory?" Cheris said.

At the moment she was, reluctantly, puzzling over Commander Hazan's glass pillar. Every time she got near it, it glowed faintly, and odd images like waking dreams played through her mind. Trees swaying in a high wind. A laughing girl. Dueling practice. His memories, she suspected, which meant the entire cindermoth was a mausoleum of glass souls. And if it hadn't been for Jedao's protection, she would be among them.

Jedao's shadow paced over to the glass pillar, overlapping it, and Cheris could have sworn it shuddered, with a faint ringing sound like bells. "Be fair, Cheris. I have to have something to work with."

"You really should have figured out a way to magic armies out of nowhere." Cheris looked around glumly at the way light reflected in all the glass pillars. It would have been beautiful, like a garden of sculptures, if she hadn't known what the pillars had once been. "What did you think you were going to do, lead a planet-by-planet revolution in an _interstellar empire_?"

"There are ways it could have worked if I'd had a snakefucking _swarm_ ," Jedao said. "But you are correct in that there's no sense bemoaning the fact that we don't have one and can't get one. What we do need are friends."

Cheris glanced sharply at the fox-shadow with its nine tails. "You, _friends_?"

"I wasn't always reviled. And I don't mean friends in the sense of having a beer together, anyway." His voice was dry.

Cheris had grown accustomed to Jedao's statements failing to add up. That didn't mean she enjoyed digging through them trying to figure out what he was up to all over again. "You _say_ all you wanted was a swarm," she said, her tone sharpening. "But you had one. Back when you were alive. Why didn't you rebel _then_?"

"The odds were too bad, and the heptarchs too powerful."

She couldn't keep the incredulity out of her voice: "And they're better _now_?"

"We have to work with what we have, Cheris."

The enormity of what had happened threatened to crush her from every side. "You _provoked_ the attack on the swarm, don't you dare deny it. And you still can't bring yourself to tell me what your game really is."

"Fine," Jedao said grimly. "It went like this..."

_four_

Jedao had had many anchors, and not a one of them had trusted him, or liked him either. Granted, as a Shuos he'd already been used to that. But Hellspin had made him _notorious_ , and the fact that most of his anchors didn't want to have anything to do with him hadn't helped.

Ordinarily he was very good at controlling bleed-through, as a matter of survival. He didn't dare let Kel Command know he was slipping their control, and he most especially didn't want Nirai Kujen to know that he had more...capabilities than even Kujen had intended to give him. Kujen, who had never seen a self-indulgence he didn't like, wouldn't have been able to imagine four centuries of deprivation without once cracking and giving in to the raw thirst for _sensation_ , for communion with another's mind.

Despite his current reputation, Jedao had once been known for treating his soldiers fairly. "Fair" was not always possible if he was to win the battles Kel Command pointed him at. He had learned out of hard desperation to use whatever levers the situation provided him with. But he needed to maintain some approximation of "fair" in order to work with his anchors at all.

He'd broken that rule already, with Cheris. He'd had a reason, at the time; needed her to _understand_ , as fast and sharp as possible, who he was and what he was capable of. Needed to spook her good.

That didn't mean that his previous decision wasn't fucking him over in the present.

And even that didn't mean he wouldn't break the rule _again_ , when faced with the hard ugly exigencies of their situation.

Because these were the truths he knew: That the hexarchate would never let them escape, given a choice. That he didn't know, couldn't know, how much time remained before someone caught up to them. Even during his lifetime he'd never known the full extent of the Kel listening posts, and as much as Kel Command and the Shuos hexarch squabbled with each other, he couldn't imagine that the two weren't cooperating to the fullest possible extent in an emergency, either. And worst of all, he was down to one ally, if you could call her that. He needed her to understand, fast; couldn't afford the days (weeks, months--longer, even) that it would take to persuade her of his cause.

That left one option.

Cheris, for her part, was currently munching on a ration bar. Jedao allowed himself the smallest indulgence in preparation for what he was about to do. He opened himself to her senses, opened her to _his_. The pebbly dry texture of the bar, and the crumbs caught between her teeth; the flavor, which he vaguely identified as sweet with a hint of spices that he no longer recognized, after centuries without the ability to taste; the convulsive motion of her throat as she swallowed a dutifully chewed bite.

"Cheris, I'm sorry," Jedao said, entirely sincerely. Then, before she had a chance to ask questions or flinch or react at all, he slammed into her mind and opened the floodgates to full-on bleed-through.

_five_

Cheris knew in her deepest heart of hearts that Jedao apologizing was a sure sign of calamity.

She'd experienced an unexpected spike of bleed-through once before, during the siege. She remembered the glass edge of despair, the way she'd thought longingly about drawing the knife across her throat. Emotions that didn't belong to her.

But she hadn't known how much worse it could get.

A jumble of memories--

Jedao the day he learned about his brother's suicide on the anniversary of the Hellspin massacre. Being unable to cry or howl or batter his fists against the nearest wall because he had no body anymore, just the pitiless boundary between light and shadow.

Jedao preparing to fire his sniper rifle from a covered position, smeared over with mud, insects eating him alive. Assassinating dissident after dissident on the Shuos heptarch's orders. Losing count--something Cheris herself would never have done--because Jedao couldn't track all the _numbers_.

Jedao listening to the rumors that Kel Command was about to implement hivemind technology as a security measure. There had been a turncoat at the highest levels who'd been feeding information to one of the heptarchate's foreign enemies. Which was all very well, except Kel Command's justifiable paranoia threatened Jedao.

 _Threatened what?_ Cheris thought beneath the surge of unwanted memories. She knew what it was like to thirst for revenge against Kel Command. They had, after all, killed her soldiers. That she hadn't gotten to know them personally the way she'd known her company a lifetime ago was only a detail. It was the principle of the thing.

He'd been loyal for so long, though. What had Kel Command done to turn him against them?

Even in this the assault of memory was relentless, not least the fact that he didn't _want_ to tell her. The name came to her: Vestenya Ruo. It _tasted_ familiar, and she choked, wanted to cough it out of her, claw it out all the way down to the lungs. She had never heard it before, even in connection with the terrible cold stories of Jedao's life.

She remembered _kissing Ruo_ , the scratch of stubble against her chin; scrambled upright and away and banged into a bulkhead in her attempt to _get away_ from the sudden, alien heat of desire, things shared and unshared. _This is ridiculous,_ she would have said, because as much as she didn't much care for men in bed, she was no stranger to the idea of men having sex with each other, and yet the visceral ache of desire for someone she'd never met hit her like a tide and an itch and a profound betrayal.

"I'm sorry," she said, almost unable to hear herself, "I'm sorry," not even knowing what she was sorry about except she knew. Even if the bleed-through wasn't _her_ fault, it couldn't be comfortable for Jedao either, exposing himself to her like this. That was what she tried to tell herself.

Then the guilt hit her, and a cry rose out of her throat, so loud that she couldn't believe it was her. Because it wasn't. It was a dead man giving voice to a grief he had kept hidden for centuries, the lover he'd gotten killed. The lover on whose behalf he had sworn a complicated clockwork vengeance against the heptarchs.

The rest of the story came in mirror-edged pieces. Cheris closed her eyes and concentrated on the simple necessity of breathing. _So that was why,_ she thought, a faint thread of understanding. She went limp against the bulkhead. There was a cramp in her leg and she didn't even care.

When the barrage of memories finally ebbed away, it took Cheris several long minutes to register that they'd stopped.

"That's it," Jedao said, his voice raw. "You know everything now."

She still didn't open her eyes, but she imagined the shadow watching her.

"The massacre was necessary. It was the only way I could--"

It was astonishing how quickly she could become flushed with adrenaline, even now. She knew the details of his _gambit_ , and she didn't care. "I don't want to talk to you," Cheris said, enunciating the way she'd learned to at Kel Academy. "Maybe not for the rest of my life."

The silence was immediate.

_six_

Jedao was tempted to beg.

Kujen had liked it when he begged, long ago. Admittedly in a completely different context. But while Jedao was not without pride, he was also a practical man.

He didn't think a demonstration of practicality was what Cheris was after.

He'd known that Cheris would react poorly. At least she had the facts now. He could only hope, wretched as it was, that she'd come around.

So Jedao stayed silent. He stayed silent when Cheris wandered around the cindermoth on her rounds, calling forth light from the columns of fluted glass and weeping over the dead. He stayed silent when she took grease pencils and drew faces out of his past, people centuries gone. This was how he learned that she had a small talent for portraits, something he'd never possessed. His artistic skills were strictly limited to recon maps and sketching out kill zones. He stayed silent because she had made it clear that he wasn't to talk until she gave him permission. It was the closest thing to an exorcism she had.

Sometimes she sang. That wrecked him worst of all. He held himself close in, wanting to influence her as little as possible with the bleed-through; he doubted she needed his reflexes immediately, given that she was the only living person left aboard the cindermoth. The damage he'd done to her voice, her accent, had receded, and she sang with what had to be her own native accent, more guttural than his own. She had a strong, clear voice, and while Jedao couldn't hold a tune in a bucket, he did appreciate the mournful quality of the songs.

Jedao had thought there could be no torment worse than imprisonment in the black cradle.

Instead, here he was, with access to a body, the world of one living person if not _the living_ precisely, and she didn't want anything to do with him. He was used to contempt. He was not used to the contempt of someone who knew literally everything about him.

 _You needed to know,_ Jedao thought, second-guessing himself. The part of him that was shadow crouched behind Cheris, out of sight, and watched her teeter at the brink of madness. He didn't know if he was strong enough to let her take the familiar plunge alone.

_seven_

After a time that passed like mists out of dream, Cheris returned to herself. Slowly and inexorably, it came to her that she had stopped marking time. The cindermoth kept track, of course--but the cindermoth's readings also told her that the high calendar grew more and more fragile as they neared the borders of hexarchate space.

She ate another ration bar. For the first time in weeks and weeks she paid heed to the flavor, such as it was. Honey, definitely, and a hint of dried fruit. She glanced sideways in search of the ninefox shadow. It remained elusive.

Cheris grimaced at the reek that rose from her own body. She had not been good about hygiene, and there was blood crusted under her fingernails from...she couldn't remember. Some of it looked old and black. Even the uniform was starting to wilt, a bad sign, considering its usual ability to clean itself. Related to the faltering of the high calendar where they were, no doubt.

So she went next to her cabin. Funny how it had once struck her as absurd and oversized. Now that she had the entire cindermoth to herself, it didn't seem to matter as much anymore.

She ran a bath. Soaked in it as long as she dared, until her skin turned wrinkled and the water had gone lukewarm. Rose out of it and toweled herself off, heedless of the damp footprints she left on the deck.

Cheris stood before the mirror after she'd dressed, gloves included. Jedao stared back. His eyes were bloodshot, the dark hair with its unruly bangs too disheveled to be remotely regulation. The uniform looked as though it had been slept in night after night on a campaign that refused to end.

He didn't speak.

"Four hundred years and no one knew," Cheris said to him. "Not even the black cradle's master, not all of it."

He still didn't speak.

"I know you were desperate," Cheris said. "I know you were backed into a corner. And I know you saw things about the heptarchate that I never even thought about until you showed them to me."

His half-gloved hands clenched.

"But no more massacres. For either of us. I don't know if there's a peaceful solution, exactly, but shooting things can't be our first solution."

In the mirror, Jedao bowed his head. "You said 'our,'" he said.

"We're together," Cheris said, "now and always. The question is whether we'll do things the sane way or your way."

"I think you've decided that," Jedao said. He reached a hand out to the surface of the mirror, his expression grave.

Cheris matched his hand with her own, smaller one. She saw the moisture in Jedao's eyes, but didn't remark on it. They had nothing to hide from each other, not anymore.


End file.
